The Death of the Invisible Man
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: Set in the 1930s movie, Jack Griffin's thoughts as he slowly and painfully dies as he waits for Flora. He thinks of the things he has done, all of his hopes and his regrets.


The 1930s The Invisible Man movie with Claude Rains was a classic. I was re-watching the death scene of the Invisible Man, and I decided to write this little oneshot where Griffin died so I could write it from his own perspective as the effect of the drugs he'd taken to make himself invisible wore off and his sanity began to return...but too late.

I don't own the Invisible Man.

Feedback would be nice.

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The Death of the Invisible Man.

Jack Griffin had been drifting in and out of consciousness as the doctors of the hospital examined him, but he knew their ministrations were useless; the bullet had passed through one of his lungs and they couldn't get it out, but personally a part of him was glad for that. It was the part of him that had had good intentions behind the invention of the invisibility drug, it was coming back to him after being submerged partially by the madness caused by the monocaine.

As he lay there, his body weak and dying, Griffin had time to think more clearly than he had done in a while. He could feel the effects of the drug he'd spent a month injecting into his body begin to wear off, when he had been fully invisible and healthy beyond being naked, and feeling the varying effects of British weather on his bare skin, the drug had felt like he had ingested a ton of sugar, but now he felt considerably weaker.

With that weakness came a clarity which had been deprived from him for so long as the effects of the drugs had clouded his judgement.

For the past five years, Jack's life had been divided between taking care of himself, helping Dr. Cranleigh (and Kemp, though even if he regretted what he had done under the influence of the drug, fuelled by the anger he had felt because he had truly hoped that Kemp would have helped him find a way back to visibility again, only to betray him) and spending time with Cranleigh's daughter, Flora and immersing himself into his experiments into invisibility.

It had taken five years of constant experimentation right into the dawn, constantly mixing one batch of chemicals after another before he had learnt of monocaine.

Monocaine was the key to becoming invisible when he had searched through various books for something, anything to help him when he had reached the end of his rope with the disappointments. But when he had found that drug, and the facts about it he had decided to give it a try, and it worked.

He had an invisibility drug, but he had not foreseen the inevitable problems. Firstly, the drug made him invisible, not intangible; he had to avoid being run down by cars, bumped into by people, and covered with soot in the smoky cities. Secondly, once he had injected himself with the drug, no matter how long he waited, it would not wear off. He was completely invisible.

When he had gone to Iping in search of somewhere secluded and quiet to work, he had hoped to find a way to reverse the effects quickly, hopefully it wouldn't take as long to cure as it had done to create the invisibility drug in the first place. But no such luck - the villagers had driven Griffin out of his mind, and if that wasn't bad enough he had been feeling the effects of the madness brought on by the drugs.

That confrontation sparked off by Mrs Hall had been the catalyst to set him off though the villagers peeping through the curtains and through the keyhole, coupled by the taunting of the village children and the constant attempts by the villagers to ask him questions before his reclusiveness and his general appearance scared them until they became so unreasonable when the inevitable outburst came had not helped.

Jack had tried to get them to stop, to listen to reason, but they had refused. The madness exploded within his head, and all of the anger and frustration he had been feeling for the past five years erupted finally; the deep-rooted envy he had felt for Dr Cranleigh and Kemp, the desire for wealth, fame, and honour, but more importantly the means to make his parents finally proud of him for having achieved something better than himself while he had felt anger deep down for the way they didn't consider his scientific knowledge to be worthwhile, the desire to marry Flora but knowing deep down that Cranleigh would want someone better for his daughter, but the anger and frustration he had felt that his work was going no-where when he had tried to find the right drug combination after thousands of experiments…. it had combined with the anger he had felt when his life was being constantly probed and prodded by the nosy villagers.

By the time he had reached Kemp's home, Griffin had been drifting between sanity and insanity. Truthfully he had enjoyed terrorising the village even if most of his actions had been that of an invisible madman, a clown playing stupid and ridiculous pranks; taking that hat off the old man and throwing it into that stream, stealing that bicycle… they were kid's stuff.

But he had managed to work off his anger, and when he had arrived at Kemp's house he had been saner, but he had felt euphoric because of the drugs. When he had threatened Kemp with strangulation, he had meant it because of the deep-rooted envy and anger he still felt for the coward, but his insanity had raised its head again when he had summarised for his co-worker what he had done, but when he'd moved onto the village his whole demeanour had shifted.

By that point in time, Griffin had spent a whole day travelling to Kemp's house, thinking about the village with the same feel of a man feeling an adrenaline rush. The amusement he had felt at pranking but overall frightening the villagers had altered him, and somehow the desire to cause pain, death, and destruction entered his mind, a spark blown into a flame when Jack accepted that as an invisible man it would have been easy for him to do so.

As he had explained to Kemp, the drugs he had taken had seemed to light up his brain, and suddenly he realised the power he had at his disposal. He had the power, power to rule and to make the world grovel at his feet. All that from pranking a bunch of useless villagers, it was an impressive step up, to say the least. The transformation of a madman to a cold, calculating murderer frightened even Griffin, but the euphoria of the drugs, the freedom they gave him…. it had overwhelmed him.

When he had murdered that fat little policeman in Iping, Griffin had only meant to see what was going on, but when the policeman refused to believe in the existence of an invisible man, Griffin had been furious and he had killed the man by strangling him. That same fury was what had fuelled his rampage, it was what had made him smash that lantern over that signalman's head when he broke into that signal box and crashed that train, killed all of those people, committing those other murders along the way.

That time he'd broken into the bank had been more out of harmless fun than anything else, but it was Kemp's murder that had been the most personal of all the murders he had committed.

Kemp had been his colleague, and while he had always considered the oily man a coward and a sneak, Griffin had assumed Kemp possessed enough common sense to keep his nerve, particularly when he had told the other man his story and after he had forced Kemp to drive him back to Iping so he could collect his notebooks which were, luckily, still in the room he had rented from the Halls, and he had murdered that policeman out of anger to show the world he did exist.

But no.

Kemp had panicked and he had blabbed, first to Dr Cranleigh and then to the police.

Griffin had always called Kemp a dirty little coward, but seeing him snivelling in that car of his, dressed in that police overcoat with that helmet jammed on top of his head before he'd killed him had been therapeutic. Kemp had been his rival for Flora's hand, but while he had entertained ideas of finding a way to murder Kemp in the past, it wasn't until he'd turned invisible those desires had become reality.

When Cranleigh had brought Flora to Kemp's house, her presence had felt like a balm which had calmed him down. But after they began to talk, the madness had returned with a vengeance and he had frightened her, he knew that now he was saner since the drug's effects on his system faded as body lost more strength. Thinking of Flora made him feel even more regret. How often had he dreamt of proposing to her, but he had had nothing to offer her? When they'd met at Kemp's house and she had begged him to stop what he was doing, he had not listened to her, but he had told her he had delved into the science of invisibility because he had wanted to become a rich, famous and respected scientist, not a poor, struggling chemist, pushed to the shadows of inadequacy while chemists like Kemp and Cranleigh were better than him.

Griffin became aware of one of the doctor's standing over him; if he didn't have his injury then Griffin would have probably tried to strangle him out of mindless malice, but with the drugs becoming increasingly weaker as he lay on the bed dying, Griffin could barely move. In a way, this was better than being shot out in the open.

"Is Flora there?" he asked weakly.

"She's coming now," the doctor said.

Griffin smiled weakly, feeling the drugs getting weaker; he would soon become visible again, though he wished he had succeeded in finding a cure to clear up the effects. Maybe this was the cure.

The sound of a door opening and footsteps approaching broke through his morbid thoughts, and Flora entered his vision, her father behind her. She looked as beautiful as ever, and that funny little hat was perched on her head.

"I knew you would come to me, Flora," Griffin said weakly, wishing he had the time to say something, anything, more comforting to her before he died, but he was growing progressively weaker with each second. "I wanted to come back to you, my darling. I've failed. I meddled in things, that man must leave alone…."

With that, Jack Griffin, the Invisible Man, was dead.

He never had the chance to tell Flora that he loved her, and he took that regret with him to the grave.


End file.
